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In the Spirit of Bret Harte

Think the Trinity River fish are threatened now? Just wait for Brown’s water bond

United States Bureau of Reclamation announced that it would not release the preventative flows needed to avert a fish kill. Instead, they will wait until salmon show signs of disease and start dying, and would only release an “emergency flow” that would take at least four days to reach infected salmon in the Lower Klamath and up to a week if a die-off is discovered over a weekend.

But wait that’s not crazy enough! Governor Brown want to build tunnels to help divert more water, using your tax dollars. He not going to straight up tell you that.

In an email sent to his campaign supporters on August 5, Governor Jerry Brown called for a “no frills, no pork” $6 million bond that would be “tunnels neutral.”

Opponents of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan’s proposed $67 billlion tunnels quickly challenged the claim that the bond is” tunnels neutral” – and called for Brown to release the language of his water bond.

Brown explained the reasons for his pared down bond in his email, one of only three his campaign staff have sent out to supporters:

“Five years ago, state legislators and the Governor put a pork-laden water bond on the ballot — with a price tag beyond what’s reasonable or affordable. The cost to taxpayers would be enormous — $750 million a year for 30 years — and would come at the expense of funding for schools, health care and public safety. This is on top of the nearly $8 billion a year the state already spends on bond debt service.”

Since being elected governor, I’ve worked with the Legislature to reduce the state’s fiscal liabilities. Together, we’ve made steady progress paying down debt and enacting responsible, balanced budgets and it is no time to turn back now. Therefore, I’m proposing a no-frills, no-pork water bond that invests in the MOST CRITICAL PROJECTS without breaking the bank.

“My $6 billion plan provides for water use efficiency and recycling, effective groundwater management and added storage. It invests in safe drinking water, particularly in disadvantaged communities and for watershed restoration and increased flows in some of our most important rivers and streams.”

In June, the Brown administration circulated an outline for his bond, the “Water Action Plan Financing Act of 2014,” among Legislators, water districts and stakeholders. The measure includes $2 billion for storage, $1.5 billion for watershed protection, watershed ecosystem restoration and state settlements, $1.5 billion for water quality and water supply reliability, $500 million for the Delta and $500 million for statewide flood management.

Restore the Delta (RTD) questioned Governor Brown’s assertion that his new water bond is “tunnels neutral,” and called upon him to release his specific proposed language.

“Governor Brown is using the bully pulpit of his office to insist that his bond proposal is tunnel neutral,” said RTD Executive Director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, “However, with $700 million marked for statewide water related habitat, flows, and water quality in watersheds, Restore the Delta questions if these funds will be used to create the water fund account needed to make the Delta tunnels project operational.”

“We are calling on Governor Brown to release the specific proposed language of the bond to prove that it is truly Delta tunnels neutral. According to documents from a Freedom of Information Act Request filled by the Kern County Water Agency, BDCP water exporters are expecting the State to fund a water flows account for over $1 billion so that they can receive full export levels from the project,” said Barrigan-Parrilla.

“This documented assurance reveals that the water exporters thirst will not be quenched by a tunnel project that simply promotes reliability, but rather by one that produces more and more from Northern California groundwater supplies, rivers, and the SF Bay-Delta estuary,” she stated.

Asssembly Member Mariko Yamada (D-Davis) summed up the feelings of many tunnel opponents when she said at a big rally against the BDCP at the State Capitol on July 29, “We don’t want to support a water bond that is tunnels neutral. We want a bond that is tunnels negative.”

BDCP background: Governor Jerrry Brown’s Bay Delta Delta Conservation Plan to build the 35-mile long peripheral tunnels won’t create one drop of new water, but the project will lead to horrendous environmental degradation, according to tunnel critics. The construction of the tunnels, estimated to cost $67 billion, will hasten the extinction of Central Valley Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers.

Friends of the River and other BDCP opponents say Brown’s “legacy” project will destroy the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas that provides a nursery for many species. It will harm salmon, halibut, leopard shark, soupfin shark, sevengill shark, anchovy, sardine, herring, groundfish and Dungeness crab populations stretching from Southern Washington to Southern California.

Under the guise of habitat restoration, the BDCP will take vast tracts of Delta farmland, among the most fertile on the planet, out of production in order to irrigate toxic, drainage impaired land on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley and provide Delta water to Southern California developers and oil companies conducting fracking and steam injection operations in Kern County.

The tunnels are being constructed in tandem with the federal government’s plan to raise Shasta Dam, a project that will flood many of the remaining sacred sites of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe that weren’t inundated by Shasta Dam.

2 thoughts on “Think the Trinity River fish are threatened now? Just wait for Brown’s water bond”

I have to admit I have some sympathy with the State of Jefferson crowd.

Not because of the politics involved or because I think a State of Jefferson would be economically viable (no on both points)… but because that may be the only way to keep our brethren to the south from sucking us dry.

As long as we are politically connected to the far more numerous south of this state… we will be forced to help badly placed cities survive in deserts where there is not enough water to maintain them to keep their lawns green and their pools filled.